Christopher Woods
Officer who co-ordinated partisans with SOE in Italy then spent the Cold War serving in MI6
CHRISTOPHER WOODS, who has died aged 92, spent more than eight months with SOE as a British liaison officer in Italy behind the German lines; after the war, he was posted abroad as an officer in the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, or MI6) under diplomatic cover.
In July 1944 Woods joined SOE, as part of No 1 Special Force, the effective nucleus of the Executive’s operations in Italy. He was told to report to Monopoli and was sent on a weapons training, sabotage and parachute course. He already spoke passable Italian.
In August, his mission, code-named Ruina, was the first to be dropped to the Italian partisans in the western Veneto. Its action zone lay in the mountain areas of Vicenza and Trento between the rivers Brenta and Adige to the east of Lake Garda.
Its main task was to co-ordinate partisan activity with General Alexander’s offensive, aimed at breaking through the German Gothic Line into the Po valley before winter 1944. Its role consisted of infiltrating behind the enemy front line and supporting the partisans in harassing the Germans.
There were a number of defined targets, such as roads and railways, ambushing convoys and troop concentrations. Clandestine sabotage was preferred in order to avoid the reprisals that the Germans often inflicted on the civilian population after obviously successful operations.
Mission Ruina took off from Bari in a Dakota aircraft at midnight on August 12 1944. The operation was led by Major John Wilkinson and was allotted a radio officer. All were in uniform. Woods’s nom de guerre was Colombo.
The drop zone was a wooded area on Monte Pau, on the southern edge of the Asiago plateau. It turned out to be littered with boulders and Woods hit the ground hard. They were met by a reception party of about 30 noncommunist partisans, who gave them a shot of grappa to drink and a slice of polenta. Woods said afterwards that it was like eating sawdust washed down with petrol.
A big enemy drive by German troops in the area of Posina had just taken place. This had dispersed the partisans and Woods spent the next few weeks in very dangerous conditions contacting and reorganising them.
The mission had been told to try to take centralised command of the partisans, but achieving this over a large area covered by mutually antagonistic groups proved impossible. Much of Woods’s time was spent struggling across the rugged terrain, dodging enemy patrols, so as to select drop zones in preparation for delivering supplies or parachuting in other missions.
The drop zones were given code names, often the nicknames of generals such as AUK and MONTY. When these were exhausted, they used those of the seven dwarves. One passage in a mission report read: “Went to SNEEZY and BASHFUL to await supplies.” Woods’s mission was greatly hindered by the fact that very few supplies were received before winter.
Early in September, in the area of Recoaro, he was being escorted by a small armed group of partisans when they were ambushed by a German patrol. Only through his coolness and courage did the party save itself from being wiped out.
On September 6, while he was away, the Germans employed shock tactics by swamping the area of Asiago with a large-scale offensive. The partisans were shaken and the Mission HQ was moved to Conca. On October 10, with the first of the winter snow only a few weeks away, the HQ was moved to a barn on a mountainside near the small village of Laghi. It had a large living room and a fireplace and Woods and his companions slept on straw.
A girl came from some houses a quarter of a mile away to cook for them. The dwellings had electricity and the radio officer went there to use the radio. Transmissions had to be kept short to avoid detection by German radio direction-finding devices.
Woods had several narrow escapes. On one occasion, he had crossed the mountains on the way to Folgaria and was feeling exhausted. A lorry belonging to a German forced labour organization came past and he hitched a lift but his identity was not discovered.
On another, after a long march, he rolled down a hillside in the snow and came to rest in full view of a German parade ground. He was, however, too tired to move for some time so was not spotted.
In December, Woods, who had recently been promoted to captain, went to Folgaria to meet a group of partisans. When they arrived at the house chosen for the meeting, they discovered that most of the group had been arrested. They waited for two hours for their contact to arrive. Suddenly the door burst open and Woods was confronted with a number of Italians brandishing guns.
There were some unpleasant moments before one of the partisans recognised him from an earlier meeting and greeted him warmly. He found out some time afterwards that a fresh grave had been dug for him outside the house.
Informers, usually with Fascist sympathies, who infiltrated the ranks of the partisans were a constant risk. Woods remembered discussing with Wilkinson whether they should shoot a man they suspected of being a spy.
There were many escapees who passed through the mission’s hands. Some were downed American pilots, others were ex-PoWs who had escaped from German prison trains or been freed from Italian camps after the armistice.
Woods had been wearing British Army uniform, but the rigours of an Italian winter in the mountains forced him to don civilian clothes and come down into the villages. The risk of detection was much higher there but he maintained constant wireless contact with base, called for supply sorties and sabotage material and attacked the enemy on every possible occasion.
These attacks provoked retaliation with the result that he and his comrades were regularly driven from their hiding places. In January 1945, the mission set up a temporary HQ in the house of Count Federigotti in the village of Pomarolo.
When they knocked on the door in the middle of the night it was opened by the Count in evening dress. They spent the night on a funeral bier in the family chapel and hid their weapons under the altar steps.
A few days later, the count was playing a game of bridge with the commander of the local German garrison. When the commander took the opportunity to enquire after the Count’s English guests, it was decided that the time had come for the mission to move again.
In March, Wilkinson, the mission commander, was ambushed and killed by Fascists. Woods and Captain John Orr-Ewing then took over the running of the mission. They found it very difficult to keep the hotheaded partisans in check. But at the end of April, together with the Italians, they fought their way into Schio, a local industrial centre, and set up a new Mission HQ there.
They took the local German surrender there but the partisans made the mistake of permitting the German paratroopers to keep their weapons. The paratroopers withdrew and were fired on by the hotheaded partisans, after which the Germans carried out savage reprisals.
The German surrender in Italy became effective on May 3. A month later, Woods was back in Britain. He was awarded an Immediate MC.
Christopher Matthew Woods was born at Dulwich on May 26 1923 and won a scholarship to Bradfield College. He went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, after the war to read History and Modern Languages with Russian.
In the summer of 1942, he enrolled in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps and was commissioned the following year. After landing in Algeria in autumn 1943, he was seconded to the 5th Battalion Royal West Kent Regiment and posted to Italy.
He found himself in command of an anti-tank platoon in the Abruzzi in mid-winter. His unit had suffered heavy losses and he recalled that his men were a restive, rather mutinous crew under a martinet of a sergeant.
One night, accompanied by his corporal, he visited an isolated, ruined building to check on two men he had posted as a look-out. They had come under a mortar attack and he was concerned for their welfare. On arrival, he and the corporal saw no sign of the men, and found that the door was locked.
The corporal handed Woods his sub-machine gun and then tried to barge the door down. Woods was holding the weapon by the trigger guard, but the safety catch was off, his finger slipped and a .45 bullet went through his boot and his big toe. Fortunately it caused no long-term damage.
From July 1945 to December 1946 he served with the Political Warfare Division in Java and Sumatra. He retired from the Army in January 1947 and the following year began working for MI6.
He served at the Tehran station from 1950 to 1952, and was transferred to Ismailia in the Canal Zone in 1953, and then withdrawn to Nicosia. He was appointed head of station in Milan in 1957, and moved back to head office at Broadway Buildings in Victoria in 1958.
He was appointed to the Rome station in 1962, and was promoted Controller, Soviet Bloc in 1965.
Upon his retirement in 1988 he succeeded the redoubtable Edward Boxshall as the Foreign Office’s SOE Adviser and completed an official history of SOE in Italy. In 2006 he contributed a chapter on operations in Italy to SOE: A New Instrument of War, published by the Imperial War Museum.
Settled in Suffolk, he listed his interests in Who’s Who as birds, churches, music and books. Throughout his career he maintained the charm and bearing of the regiment into which he was commissioned at the age of 20.
Christopher Woods was appointed CMG in 1979; he described it as a “Cold War medal”. He contributed to a Festschrift for MRD Foot and to published records of various British and Italian gatherings of SOE. A family memoir, Petrol and Sawdust, was published privately.
He married first, in 1954, Gillian Sara Rudd; she died in 1985. He married secondly, in 1992, Mrs Patricia Temple Muir, who had once been married to the band leader Humphrey Lyttelton. She survives him with four sons and a daughter from his first marriage.